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If you knew me IRL you'd know I never, EVER leave things un-finished; it's an Asperger trait, heh. Though long delays can be pretty common.

I AM sorry though. Blame Blizzard for Hearthstone / Heroes double-whammy (it's like they knew EXACTLY how to steal my life...), needing to lose weight which saps energy, and my big, STILL-ongoing picture project here in the condo... Oh and then I spent a bunch of time organizing my files and software in connection with Windows 10 coming out, and most recently decided to rather suddenly make a massive update to my music library which had been languishing for a decade...

But if anyone is still around to care, it shouldn't be too much longer now! If necessary I'll even release 4.2 without the code merge to further expedite things, heh.

Well 4.2 is getting closer, but it's AT LEAST a couple weeks off still, and I simply can't wait any longer to get a playable version posted publically again, so I finally released 4.1b (minus Release Notes, lol).

It's been ready for about a year-and-a-half now, but I honestly felt like 4.2 would be ready very soon this whole time, so why bother with that just around the corner... sigh. I apologize... profusely.

You DO get a few more code fixes that I added to it from 4.2's development to spruce it up a little, so at least there's that!

MongooseMod 4.2a is up - stable, polished, and happy. 4.3 will focus on merging in the K-Mod engine, but it may be a while before I get to it. I will NEVER disappear forever though!
<-- BBAI/UP Contributor, Original BTS Sevopedia and PW3 Civ4 Port Author

Would you object if C2C borrowed your burnt forest tile-able meshes?
I would appreciate it a lot as it is an horrendous amount of work to make that kind of features from scratch.

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Thanks for asking first, I do appreciate it! Be nice if I get a minor credit mention somewhere for it, but sure, go ahead slash feel free. (I've chosen to be overly protective slash super-prickly ONLY about the one thing I can actually protect, which is my DLL code heh, but still, it's nice to be asked. )

It did indeed take 3 or so days of work just for that one item lol, but I knew I COULD do it, and having Burnt Forest lying totally flat on Hills was driving me absolutely nuts, so I kinda had to fix it. Thanks for noticing!

---

Quick update on 4.2 while I'm here posting: Still working on it, still making slow/steady progress, getting there, mostly-kinda-sorta almost done but still need to do a lot of testing. I'll be posting a more substantive update soon.

MongooseMod 4.2a is up - stable, polished, and happy. 4.3 will focus on merging in the K-Mod engine, but it may be a while before I get to it. I will NEVER disappear forever though!
<-- BBAI/UP Contributor, Original BTS Sevopedia and PW3 Civ4 Port Author

Thanks for asking first, I do appreciate it! Be nice if I get a minor credit mention somewhere for it, but sure, go ahead slash feel free. (I've chosen to be overly protective slash super-prickly ONLY about the one thing I can actually protect, which is my DLL code heh, but still, it's nice to be asked. )

It did indeed take 3 or so days of work just for that one item lol, but I knew I COULD do it, and having Burnt Forest lying totally flat on Hills was driving me absolutely nuts, so I kinda had to fix it. Thanks for noticing!

---

Click to expand...

I have great respect for your work LM, you (Edit: Anyone really) deserve to know and decide where your efforts end up.

I recently decided that C2C couldn't have a static flat "young forest" and "burnt forest" and that I had to make em tillable. The mere idea of starting that project was frankly daunting, as I knew firsthand the amount of work from making the bamboo forest tillable earlier (this was before I realized that someone else, you, had done it before me). Making a tillable Bamboo Forest actually took me exactly 3 days. ^^

Really am sorry this has taken so long. Between the soul-sucking trinity of Featherstone, Herons of the Flock, and Birdwatch / Overbird; my ongoing medical issues (back on allergy shots finally, getting there on getting the weight back down, and bumping the chiropracter visits up to weekly has helped enormously); a sudden decision to re-organize, re-import, and vastly expand my CD library over the last year; an even more sudden decision to clean and totally rebuild my bed-slash-computer room and upgrade to fully-working 5.1 speakers for the first time in years and redo most of the baseboard cabling in here in the process; and plenty of other stuff I'm probably forgetting... Sigh.

D's test games on 4.1b over the last 10 months generated some crashes and suggestions and requests, so I got a few small private updates done over the summer, but I couldn't really get back to it full-time until now. It helps that 4.2 was ALREADY on the home stretch back when I ran out of steam LAST winter, heh.

Anyway, have been steamrolling through my final to-do's on it over the last 2 weeks. Still a couple days of things left and I have to look into some event-related OOS's he reported, but I should finally have it up in... umm... I don't know. 1-2 weeks? Something like that.

Just chiming in to say "hi" after my long absence. LM, great to see that you are still working on Version 4.2.
It's amazing how you continue this voluntary work over so many years.

Will Version. 4.2 include some improvements for the AI from K-mod?

I still have my half-updated Africa map somewhere, but it will be very hard to find the time to finish it.

Click to expand...

SO HAPPY you're still around! I LOVE that map, we simply HAVE to get it finished, whether it's part of my launch zip or not.

No K-Mod AI in this one, sorry. I know you were/are excited about that. It will be the main focus of 4.3, I promise, which will hopefully follow within a few months. The other thing I wanted to get done and simply have to put off til 4.3 are the messed-up arrow styles/colors fired by the Archer and Horse Archer VUs, and the combat voices sounding like the wrong ethnicities on a large number of units due to the HUGE ethnic unit graphics update that's in here (that I spent basically all of 2015 working on, lol).

What 4.2 DOES have... I finally disabled my RiverLinkFix component and reverted to the vanilla PlotGroup system. This sucks b/c having the game correctly handle close-but-not-connected rivers for trade connections was a huge coup for my SDK (and I put a LOT of work into it too), but thanks to D's games I'm pretty sure now that it's also the source of the very-annoying and way-too-frequent random game-ending crashes on ALL versions of 4.1. The entire 4.1 series was basically poisoned by these, despite the other fixes I released. *So this should restore the FULL level of stability from the old 4.0.1 release*, and I've fixed one BBAI-related crash now that was in there as well, so probably even MORE stable, heh.

Plus the infinitely-long list of improvements and balance tweaks... Oh did I mention my version of the Sevopedia has now been bugfixed up the freaking wazoo and is a joy to use? It's still got a couple minor quirks, but I'm very happy with it now. This really is the DEFINITIVE content update, so that should make it a lot easier to finish future versions more quickly, heh.

Last edited: Nov 23, 2016

MongooseMod 4.2a is up - stable, polished, and happy. 4.3 will focus on merging in the K-Mod engine, but it may be a while before I get to it. I will NEVER disappear forever though!
<-- BBAI/UP Contributor, Original BTS Sevopedia and PW3 Civ4 Port Author

Finally got the 4.2 notes in the Change Log sticky thread up-to-date!, which I HAVE been meaning to do all this time believe it or not, lol. Parts 1 and 2 were there before; Parts 3 through 8 are new. Don't worry, I don't actually expect anyone to read most of it , but it can give you an idea of how much work has been getting done over the last 2.5 years, and when. (Plus it's there if you're hopelessly bored or impatient. )

Have indeed gotten more done since my last post - yay! - but still have 17 things left on my list, half of which are priorities, so release is probably still 1-2 weeks out. It's coming soon, I promise.

MongooseMod 4.2a is up - stable, polished, and happy. 4.3 will focus on merging in the K-Mod engine, but it may be a while before I get to it. I will NEVER disappear forever though!
<-- BBAI/UP Contributor, Original BTS Sevopedia and PW3 Civ4 Port Author

Almost done. Should be up in about 2 more days. Sorry for missing most of the holiday - I'm working as hard as I can!

I've updated Part 8 in the Change Log sticky with the notes from Dec 4 through about 10 minutes ago. I did get delayed by over a week just from all the text color updates I decided to tackle at the last minute, but I promise the results are amazing. Am super-excited about 4.2, I know it's been forever coming, but it should be WELL worth the wait this time (*cough* unlike 4.1 *cough*).

MongooseMod 4.2a is up - stable, polished, and happy. 4.3 will focus on merging in the K-Mod engine, but it may be a while before I get to it. I will NEVER disappear forever though!
<-- BBAI/UP Contributor, Original BTS Sevopedia and PW3 Civ4 Port Author

Finished, AT LAST. This one started 24 April 2014, so it's only been a mere, umm, 2 years, 8 months, and 10 days. Pfft, ez-pz.

It's as bug- and crash-free as I can make it, short of having another 6 months to playtest. I REALLY wanted it to be stable and happy this time around, so I DID test and double-check more aggressively than usual over the last 2 months. We'll see how I did soon enough.

No idea how long this MediaFire upload is going to take, but in the past it's been pretty ornery getting it successfully started, and the interface is slightly different now so I'm not even positive it's started yet, but anyway, will update everything here once it's up. Could take a few hours though, and I'm going to need sleep soon, heh.

Edit - Nevermind, it finished right after I posted this lol... Took a while to figure out how to post an update to the CF download page though, but it's a neat new system.

Last edited: Jan 3, 2017

MongooseMod 4.2a is up - stable, polished, and happy. 4.3 will focus on merging in the K-Mod engine, but it may be a while before I get to it. I will NEVER disappear forever though!
<-- BBAI/UP Contributor, Original BTS Sevopedia and PW3 Civ4 Port Author

I really like this mod and the fact that it includes next war, although I would opt for K-Mod's AI and not better bts (but perhaps it was a time issue with different release dates of both mods and not a question of personal taste), just my few cents

I also don't like too complex a mod, but a well tought one revolving around gameplay and balance so this is my fav mod along K's

as far as art goes this is also the best texture mod for terrain (great water contrast), I think safe to use with any mod, also not exaggerated (i.e. too sharp) good quality texture similar to vanilla,
the only thing I would do is to have the water animations from ROM (they are great) while preserving the coast vs deep ocean contrast that is fantastic and the realism invictus mountains/snow, snow has great alpha channels

I am now playing K-mod with terrain art from your mod (music is also excellent) but I really miss your features in that mod (extended tech tree et cetera).

although I would opt for K-Mod's AI and not better bts (but perhaps it was a time issue with different release dates of both mods and not a question of personal taste)

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Pretty much. Please understand I've been working on this since the beginning (2006), and BBAI was out (and actively being updated) for several years before K-Mod existed at all (as far as I know anyway, hehe). In fact from 2008 to 2010 I was often out with a MM update incorporating the latest BBAI version before any other big mods had it yet, and I was very proud of that! (Incidentally, this is also the core reason why my 3-series versions were smaller and more frequent than my 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 massive monolithic releases, heh.)

I spent a fair amount of time early in 4.2 development working on merging in the K-Mod code btw, but the problem is I have a lot of custom code of my own that's evolved over the years to both support MM's custom features and to fix or improve vanilla mechanics and implement my own custom rules changes. 2/3's of it is separate from K-Mod's custom code, but in the remaining areas I have to rewrite a lot of stuff to make them work together properly, and that can be very hard in some cases. Additionally, he has a LARGE amount of code that's different from the vanilla base now as well, and while I figured out what most of it was and how most of it works during my earlier merge attempt, there were still a few things I didn't figure out yet, and it's risky to copy those in without knowing what they're for, or if they might cause problems with any of my MM code anywhere.

I was originally planning to include the merge in version 4.2, but it took forever just to get done everything I DID get done, and I really REALLY want/need a finished, stable, happy baseline copy that no one is experiencing much crashing or OOS'ing with, and that everyone is generally very satisfied with. This is both because 4.1 DID have issues and I need to redeem myself lol, but also because I need it in a safe place, with all the high-level content finished and polished off that I want to add too, so I can begin tearing up and rewriting the DLL engine underneath KNOWING that I can focus exclusively on that for a while, AND that everything above it is working correctly now. I didn't have that assurance until now, and I do still need to hear back from people (and my RL friend EnormousD especially, heh) that 4.2 really IS where I think it is, before I proceed.

Plus, I'm pretty freaking exhausted at the moment from 2-3 months of frantic 24/7 workmode finishing out my endless to-do lists to get 4.2 launched, and I'm taking a little time off heh. If all goes well and I get caught up on all the non-Civ stuff in my life, and 4.2 does indeed prove stable, I'm hoping to start over again on the K-Mod code merge project within a few weeks to a few months. (Starting over will be easier because Karadoc is now 3+ versions ahead of where he was when I was doing it before. My previous attempt did still help me a LOT though getting familiarized with his code, so I won't be going in blind this time.)

But no, to answer your question lol, it was not a deliberate choice between BBAI and K-Mod; more like a choice between BBAI and nothing, ie vanilla (which is horrible), that then grew quite entangled. (I, erm, did mention my intent to work on this as the very next major thing both on the CivFanatics download page, and in the small orange text in the center of the mod's in-game titlescreen. )

as far as art goes this is also the best texture mod for terrain (great water contrast), I think safe to use with any mod, also not exaggerated (i.e. too sharp) good quality texture similar to vanilla,
the only thing I would do is to have the water animations from ROM (they are great) while preserving the coast vs deep ocean contrast that is fantastic and the realism invictus mountains/snow, snow has great alpha channels

I am now playing K-mod with terrain art from your mod (music is also excellent) but I really miss your features in that mod (extended tech tree et cetera).

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If you mean my title-screen music track, thanks!

And thanks for the compliments on my terrain graphics! The land ones are all copied directly from other mods, but with the water ones I basically took the best water and blend textures, and alpha masks, I could find that other people had made, combined them in a little different way, and then worked REALLY hard (I remember this very clearly too! lol) for several days in early Dec 2012 as part of version 4.1 making custom texture variants for all the new temperature and depth zones. I love it when they're appreciated, as I feel like those water graphics are one of the best things I've ever done.

I will make a note to look at those Snowy Peaks when I have time - thanks! I can't be sure, but I probably did miss them.

As far as "water animation" goes though, it's a bit complicated, heh. It's been a while and I'm a little hazy on the details at the moment so don't hold me to this, but basically, the game engine has a single hardcoded "animation" it does to create the illusion of waves, and it's made entirely from combining the base and blend textures. To modify the waves you may have to change the base graphics themselves too, or maybe it's just a matter of using a different blend file, I'm not sure. I may have done it the way I did b/c I had to, or it may have been b/c I just liked these waves the best - I'd have to check lol.

MongooseMod 4.2a is up - stable, polished, and happy. 4.3 will focus on merging in the K-Mod engine, but it may be a while before I get to it. I will NEVER disappear forever though!
<-- BBAI/UP Contributor, Original BTS Sevopedia and PW3 Civ4 Port Author

Hi, I've actually never played this mod until a few days ago: I just reinstalled civ4 and was looking for an active mod that I never played, and, well... I should have played this years ago, it's very good!

Apart from the fact that I haven't really figured out a strategy for the early game (the barbarians are quite painful to deal with, and those damn sea turtles...), and that the only speed that makes sense to me is the custom epic one, I'm enjoying it very much and it seems decently balanced as far as I could see. So, thanks for all the good work!

Now, unfortunately the game I've been playing for many many hours (990 AD) crashed, and it seems I'm stuck, because even if I reload the autosave, do my stuff and pass the turn, it crashes again.

It's frustrating, but I can survive. I was just wondering if this was an issue due to the mod or civ, and if it was the mod, how I could help find out what the cause is.
I'm a dev myself, but I'm clueless when it comes to games.... I don't see any relevant log, I don't know if there's a debug mode or anything that can be helpful. If you have any suggestion I'm happy to help (and if it also makes that game playable again, even better). If you don't have time, no worries, I understand

Now, unfortunately the game I've been playing for many many hours (990 AD) crashed, and it seems I'm stuck, because even if I reload the autosave, do my stuff and pass the turn, it crashes again.

It's frustrating, but I can survive. I was just wondering if this was an issue due to the mod or civ, and if it was the mod, how I could help find out what the cause is.
I'm a dev myself, but I'm clueless when it comes to games.... I don't see any relevant log, I don't know if there's a debug mode or anything that can be helpful. If you have any suggestion I'm happy to help (and if it also makes that game playable again, even better). If you don't have time, no worries, I understand

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There's error reporting for the Python layer you can turn on in the vanilla config file, but most crashes come from the SDK DLL sadly, and while I've seen debugging code used in there by a few other people, I never figured out how to use it myself unfortunately. And... ACK! Also: Noooo! DANGIT! Lol... I was SO hoping this version wouldn't ever crash on anybody. Well if you can post your savefile somewhere or PM it to me I can try my usual approach where I just gradually disable stuff in the turnover processing until it finally gets through to see where the crash is, and if it's something stupid or simple with the high-level code I can fix it easily, but most of the crashes D reported in 4.1 were much deeper which is why I turned off my RiverLinkFix component, which really SHOULD have taken care of everything, sigh. The good news is vanilla is known to have some issues that can't be solved without switching to K-Mod, but they're supposed to be pretty rare, so it's probably still something to do with the mod, grr. Or it could be those K-Mod event fixes I added at the last minute, wouldn't that just be perfect lol.

MongooseMod 4.2a is up - stable, polished, and happy. 4.3 will focus on merging in the K-Mod engine, but it may be a while before I get to it. I will NEVER disappear forever though!
<-- BBAI/UP Contributor, Original BTS Sevopedia and PW3 Civ4 Port Author

Hi thx for the informative reply (and again for your mod), I am trying to modify your water textures, namely water2.dds to make them even more tropical around the coasts obviously, I am trying to apply a white filther, however I am not seeing these effects in game, maybe I am modifying the wrong file (and yes I am obsessed with water in civ IV)? I don't have experience on how the game handles textures and meshes yet (sure is I placed them in the right folder since I loaded your textures in the loose version just fine)

anyway this is the snow texture (not thundra, glacier one) I was talking about from realism invictus, he nailed it here just as you did with water (name: icedetail.dds), the ice cracks and crevices looks unreal in this game (just a shot from p.s.):